NASA to Launch the First Satellites Built by High School Students

Starting this fall, NASA will begin launching satellites built by high school students into orbit. It's all part of the agency's CubeSat Launch Initiative, which will allow teams of student engineers to send their projects into space by piggybacking them on larger launches.

Call it one heck of a science project by the students at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.: Later this year, NASA will launch satellites designed and built by high school students into orbit for the first time—and Jefferson's satellite is near the front of the line to blast into space.

The satellite, called TJ3Sat, is in its final stages of testing, and its launch—scheduled for sometime this fall—will be the culmination of nearly five years of effort involving close to 50 students. "We're doing something that a superpower, the Soviet Union, first accomplished," says senior Alishan Hassan, the head student on the project. "It's just a feeling of great success."

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TJ3Sat is one of 20 satellites NASA selected from educational and research institutions around the country as candidates in its CubeSat Launch Initiative, which began last year. CubeSats are a class of cube-shaped research satellites weighing about three pounds; they're also called nanosatellites. Their small size allows them to piggyback on other launches, which lowers the cost of a space mission down to whatever it takes to build the satellite—$30,000, in the case of Jefferson's project. "Because you can launch so many of these at flexible costs, it really opens the door to so many different uses and venues," says Steve Chien, head of the Artificial Intelligence Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is involved in a number of CubeSat projects that are experimenting with spacecraft that have some autonomous features.

Thomas Jefferson High School's TJ3Sat will be a broadcasting module, according to Adam Kemp, head teacher for the project. "Its payload is a phonetic voice synthesizer that converts strings of text to voice," he says, "Once converted, the voice is transmitted back to earth over amateur radio frequencies." Because the team envisioned TJ3Sat as a way to promote interest in aerospace engineering, all its data is public, so students around the world will be able to use it for whatever projects they wish. Other CubeSat projects, built by university researchers and already in space, have been used for experimental functions such as detecting seismic activity, bacterial growth in zero gravity and atmospheric research.

Back at Thomas Jefferson High School, the students are hard at work as the looming April completion deadline approaches, Kemp says: "The students are now debugging for possible errors, conducting deployment tests, software glitches and any sort of hardware troubleshooting." Hassan says, "It's very challenging. The biggest [obstacle] is when problems occur that haven't been around before. It's probably been the most challenging project for me."

But all that hard work and effort is bound to pay off. "It was one of those really cool things where you got an insider's look into the industry," says University of Virginia freshman Alex McGlothlin, who was the student leader on TJ3Sat until he graduated and handed over the reins to Hassan.

McGlothlin plans to become an engineering major, and his three years of experience with TJ3Sat will be a major asset. "I've been given a leg up, sure," McGlothlin says.

When the TJ3Sat launches this fall, Kemp and his students plan to be there to see a rocket carry their science project to the great beyond. It's a moment that is sure to spark elation, and pride. "You tell people, 'I'm building a satellite at my high school,' and they snicker a bit," McGlothlin says. "But once it's up there, it's done. You've proved it."